Thermaltake SubZero4G AMD Cooling System Review - The Heatsink

For many, the mere sound of the term Alternative Cooling is enough to make them cringe. But what if I were to tell you that someone has placed some safeguards into the mix? Come join Mike "Darthtanion" Wright as he takes a hard look at the Thermaltake SubZero4G Cooling System. It uses a peltier cooling device but with some added features. He'll be looking at normal operation of this device as well as some results for an overclocked system, so come see if this is your chance to get into the new cooling craze!

While at first glance this might appear to be any standard sort of heatsink, nothing could be further from the truth. Though the sink itself is reminiscent of the Volcano 9 series coolers, we'll take a peek at what really makes it different from the others in the marketplace.

See the intermediary pieces of metal between the base of the heatsink and the base of the cooler itself? This is the peltier that I was explaining earlier. Those small pillars that go between are the two sets of dissimilar metal. When an electrical current is sent through this setup, it causes the bottom side to get cold and the top side to get hot.

Since we still want to conduct the heat away from the processor core itself, we will want to use copper as the primary contact between the cooler and the core. This will allow as much heat as possible to be absorbed into the copper and then dissipated when it meets the cold side of the peltier cooler.

To make sure that everything is kept firmly in place, this piece of copper has been welded to the base of the cooler. While not as effective as a full copper base, it is both more cost effective and lightweight. After all, we don't want to start attaching a monstrous cooler to the cooler unless we're using some sort of alternative clipping mechanism.

And speaking of the base, we can see that while reasonably smooth, the surface isn't polished at all. A little lapping might help in this area, but I will be testing the unit as it came from the factory. This has been my standard methodology and I see no reason to change that now.

The clipping mechanism used for this cooler is the same basic design as we have become accustomed to seeing on the Thermaltake line of coolers. If you've used any previous Thermaltake device, then you'll feel right at home with this one.

Finally, we see that there are more wires than normal. But it is really pretty simple to hook everything up. The pair of three-pin connectors hook up to each other and then the remaining eight-pin connector goes to the backside of the PCI card. This has all the cables for the monitoring system and power for the entire unit.

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